Rita McBride (b. 1960, Des Moines, Iowa) is internationally recognised for a multidisciplinary practice that explores the production of public space and the cultural, social, and material conditions that shape the built environment. Working principally in sculpture, McBride engages the architectural and infrastructural forms that surround daily life—ventilation ducts, seating structures, towers, façades, signage, and other utilitarian systems—recasting them in new materials, scales, and configurations. By altering the dimensions, contexts, and textures of these familiar objects, she challenges assumptions about function, authorship, industrial standardisation, and the mythologies of progress embedded in modernist design.
McBride’s work is grounded in a critical dialogue between industrial fabrication and the handmade, proposing formal systems that appear efficient or modular while revealing productive contradictions, vulnerabilities, or absurdities. This tension extends to her ongoing engagement with the gallery and museum as architectural sites. Many of her sculptures directly intervene in the logic of the “white cube,” displacing spatial neutrality and foregrounding the institutional conditions that frame reception, movement, and display. Whether situated indoors or within civic space, her works operate as open networks: objects, structures, and environments that expand into questions of collectivity, memory, and public agency.
Since the 1990s, McBride has also developed collaborative, performance-based and participatory projects—including large-scale public commissions, artist’s books, and the long-running multidisciplinary work Babel, involving an evolving cast of international writers, musicians, scientists, and thinkers. Across media, her practice reflects an ongoing commitment to testing how objects shape social space, and how that space, in turn, shapes perception.
Her work has been the subject of extensive international exhibitions and projects, including major presentations at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2014–15); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2015–16); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2015–16); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Public commissions include Mae West (2011), a monumental carbon-fibre structure in Munich, and Obelisk for the New York Public Art Fund (2023), installed at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park. McBride’s works are held in numerous institutional collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dia Art Foundation, New York; and FRAC Île-de-France, Paris.
She lives and works in Düsseldorf and Rome.